1. Technical Field
The present invention relates systems and methods for managing data and more particularly to a relational data structure and a method for optimizing a database and call data searching for achieving better performance in retrieving, reviewing and processing recorded calls in, e.g., an enterprise call center environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Voice activated self-service applications use call data. More specifically, the performance and cost of a voice-based solution depends on how call data is managed. Call data, generally speaking, includes call recording (audio), call transcribed test, and control data (e.g., such as Caller ID, Call disposition, etc.) associated with a call.
Most recording systems in call centers are telephone systems configured to only offer recording of some or all calls with searching available only by date, time and dialed number. The structure of stored data is practically meaningless.
It is extremely difficult or impossible to enable easy access, selection, retrieval and processing of any call data (content) that may be needed by researchers, developers, analysts, etc. based on call content, classification and statistical features. The speed of access to call recordings deposited in a database is usually important. Basic concerns about the speed of access for call retrieving are relevant to the database connection, Structured Query Language (SQL) query and how to manage the source or destination of local data.
In the case of a call center with a large recorded call volume, the SQL query plays a major role that influences the speed of performance. Two areas which may be considered in designing a call data repository include transactional guarantees and querying capabilities. Transactional guarantees refers to the reliable storage of call data, and the querying capability focuses on how to achieve easy retrieval, review, and archival of the data, none of which can be ignored.
To efficiently use a database, the database design should avoid needless expense. One important part of the data structure design includes a data table structure design, which can sometimes contribute greatly to improved performance. For example, if there are over 300,000 call data stored in a database, it takes minutes to search how many calls asked for a customer service representative (CSR) and to pick up the top ten most typical sentences asking for the CSR. Currently, existing data structures do not provide such capabilities or it may presently be impossible for conventional system to perform such operations.
Since no knowledge representation of call data is available on databases now, no applications can share the knowledge at the database level, and presently no data processing efforts (which are typically very costly procedures) can make this data reusable.